thanks for sharing your latest findings. I had no working species concept for pantherinoides, couldn’t argue one way or the other.
we saw them in the same area for two years running….I will surely check again come next winter.

I removed my old comments. I’ve found they just went down the wrong track and then compounded the error.

Over the last two days I’ve been looking at all my notes on Amanita pantherina var. pantherinoides because of recent queries I’ve received about that taxon. Among the notes were my notes on dried material representing this observation. I have also recently looked at some characters of pantherinoides on the type collection. First of all, this material from Pt. Reyes is nowhere near the pantherina group because it has locally common clamp connections and satisfies the criteria for being a muscarioid taxon. It could be an unusually colored muscaria subsp. flavivolvata or an undescribed species. So I’m going to propose the name Amanita muscaria group.

I’m going to send samples to Joe Geml for DNA testing.

Very best,

Rod